I guess it’s like a barometer for morals: the lower it goes the bigger the storm

You’re still in denial here. There can be symbiosis in nature where species can cohabitate to the benefit of both, but that’s just two different niches being filled. It’s a completely orthogonal topic to species competing for the same niche. It’s not about building windmills and good vibes; human beings have overstepped our natural boundaries with billions of people in places we have absolutely no evolutionary excuse to be.

We’ve done this strictly because we can; it’s the natural animal inclination to favor your own progeny and expand your access to resources. Our ability to adapt has broken the evolutionary game. We won. The mere existence of 8.3 billion humans causes an unfathomable amount of harm that can’t be fixed by skipping “tasty meals”. That’s the ethical equivalent of whitewashing guilt and ignoring the structural problem.

So asserting something like “all animals have equal rights” is asinine. They clearly don’t, and we can’t change that without abandoning the 99% of human souls who stress the system beyond its natural ethical bounds (within the expected balance of evolution).

The carrying capacity of Earth is 2-4 billion people, and that’s assuming an ultimate human primacy with no regard to other species (except in the amoral ways they could sustain human existence). A “harmless” existence is a fleeting fraction of that, the small niche filled as hunter-gatherer megafauna mammals. This is a hard physical fact no matter what universal rights we put on paper. The choice is quite literally billions of human lives against trillions of birds/insects/fish/critters/predators/prey in conflict with them. There’s no free lunch.

Plants don’t have to feel pain to be a lynch pin in the ecosystem supporting the animals around them. One less native plant is one less place to shelter or feed an endangered animal, or one less set of roots preventing the erosion of a habitat at risk.

Eliminating animal products mitigates the problem but it in no way absolves you from our exponential consumption of finite resources, and in many ways it’s naive non-solution.

For example: culling and eating pest animals like deer is not vegan, but leaving them alone with no natural predators does exponentially more harm to all other animals that depend on the native plants decimated by an unchecked deer population. Eliminating the predators is a human-caused problem but washing our hands of the situation will kill far more.

Brother I am vegan (at least 95% in diet if you want to quibble over niche animal product additives). I’m just not going to shed tears over every single creature on earth like they’re my family pet while losing sight of the purpose of harm reduction. Why is the few grams of milk powder in your chips more important than mass deforestation supporting your avocados and coffee?

If most militant vegans actually examined their emotional arguments before they posted them people would take them way more seriously. Animals suffering and dying might make you deeply uncomfortable but that’s not a universal experience. You can’t browbeat people out of 15k years of animal husbandry just because you personally couldn’t stomach skinning a rabbit.

I’m not the one making the dichotomy! I’m fully in favor of all harm reduction possible (including a vegan/utilitarian vegan diet) for the obvious benefit of our own species. The commenter above is positing that there is no ethical direct/indirect violence toward any animals. It’s impossible to hold that position while simultaneously pretending billions of people can exist.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. A simple rational examination of our limited resources is being discarded because “animals have human rights/you support slavery/you want animals to be raped”. No, I have a very obvious and consistent position:

Humans are a higher class of animal and being good stewards of our only planet is crucial for our own well being. We thrive with nature and unnatural violence (like industrial animal farming) is bad for our psyche anyway. That doesn’t mean animals can’t or won’t die to support our existence.

This stuff is so basic and fundamental; tradeoffs HAVE to be made. Pretending that the world can support life (let alone a good life) for billions of people without animal death/displacement/extinction is deranged. It’s on the commenter to pick up the shambles of that position and make anything that can fit in the real world.

Just reading text isn’t really a fair representation of the English language as you go back to beyond the 14th century. The grammar remains pretty similar if you sound it out and most vocab is similar (or can be figured out by context clues).

The non-standardized spelling and premodern characters make it feel alien but it’s mostly someone with a heavy accent using phonetics to write [approximately] what they’re sounding like. I bet most people wouldn’t struggle if the text was massaged a bit.

I reject your argument that life is a zero-sum game

Then you’re a fundamentally blind idealist or just lying to yourself. The absolute bare minimum, purely vegetarian footprint needed to support a human is about 0.2 acres (~800 m²). That’s 0.2 acres of precious arable land that could support dozens of species of plants, insects and animals purely dedicated to one human and their crops. A diverse and thriving array of life traded for one person and a handful of domesticated species.

From there you’re now looking at displacement and damage from housing, water usage, soil degradation, waste disposal, pest control and every other basic necessity. God forbid you get into modern niceties like health care, transportation, education, arts, sciences, etc…

Humans aren’t friendly little forest nymphs, we’re megafauna. Even the most benign and innocuous species of primates (such as lemurs and marmosets) peaked their populations in the high millions. Getting the human population down from 8.3 billion to a sustainable level is a 99%+ reduction. That’s a more complete eradication than any genocide in recorded history, let alone the sheer amount of death and scope of institutional collapse.

That’s just a flat fact of our reality. Either 99% of humans have no right to exist or humans are inherently a higher class of animal. Choose one.

We have vastly increased our ability to produce food. There are ample resources available on the planet for all of us to share and live in abundance.

Uh ooooooh… someone isn’t familiar with how dependent our agriculture is on pesticides, petrochemicals and heavy industry 😬

We (currently) have ample oil and topsoil. Not ample sustainable food. Don’t even get me started on out other niche limits, like our approach to peak mineral supply or pollinator collapse.

This is a ludicrous argument. If you truly believe that all animals have the same rights then the only internally consistent conclusion is the virtual extermination of the human species.

Life is a zero sum game. Something lives by consuming something else or displacing it for access to limited resources. Optimizing for the minimum harm to earth’s ecosystem is always going to be the end of agriculture, housing, hunting, industry and basically everything other human institution. We’re the most insidious invasive species ever and the world would be healthier without us mucking around.

So unless you’re stumping for that, don’t pretend to have the moral high ground. If you are, stop wasting your time shaming people and skip right to culling them.

Lots of animals snack on their babies after birth, can I munch on those?

The differentiation “human” is artificial and made up…

You share 25% of your DNA with a tree, is it slavery to own four apple trees?

Why doesn’t my dog have a right to vote? Why can a snake eat eggs but I can’t? Why is it OK for ants to farm aphids but not for humans to farm cows?

Different things are, in fact, different. There are lots of dead simple and airtight arguments for veganism without counterproductive emotional appeals. Talk about economics or ecology or health and not about sad puppy dog eyes.

Animals can have rights and be protected from unnecessary cruelty without anthropomophizing them and granting full human rights. You’re equating full, sapient humans with a species specifically bred for a base purpose without higher levels of thought and expression.

I don’t even think that statement is anthropocentric hubris. If ultra-advanced aliens showed up tomorrow and started domesticating humans for food or some other purpose, I would have the default expectation of them having the same or similar morals. Maybe we’d get access to decent healthcare and good libraries before we went to the slaughterhouse.

Cows get more rights than trees or crops because they have an ability to express pain and convey emotion. They don’t have the same rights as humans because they could never give a passionate argument for suffrage to a jury.

And to be clear: there are plenty of real, tangible reasons to end animal husbandry and make everyone vegan without even touching philosophy.

There’s a weird dissonance in these conversations where “justice” turns into “poetic justice” without the speaker realizing it. It’s an ironic reversal of positions that sounds good without any rational backing for why it would be good.

Would it be a satisfying narrative loop to result in indigenous people retaking what they historically had? Of course.

Does being a member of a marginalized group grant some specific virtue that makes you a just leader or caretaker? …Maybe tangentially? At the very least you might have more practical understanding of oppression.

Does being in a marginalized group that has a bloodline traced to an arbitrarily collection of humans who once lived in a place give you some inherent “connectedness” to (or “ownership” of) that place?..

No. That’s actually a pretty fucked up line of reasoning. That kind of argument is what propped up “Europe for Aryans” and “Blacks back to Africa”.

Your value in a community is in the bonds you have to it. Sure, some of those are family bonds, but a lifetime is far more than just that. We’re strengthened by our living connections to each other today, not by our unchosen connections to a string of dead people who can’t reciprocate.

None of us can go back in time and reverse genocides; how can those tragedies get special correction beyond curing the echoes of injustice that exist today?

In my opinion there are two simple facts:

1. People can housed, fed and have their specific needs cared for regardless of background
2. The core value in acknowledging the past is in correcting our course on current and future injustice

If we were committed to live by those the rest becomes moot.

Using in game credits to rent content? Not exactly new, I remember that being the entire business model of EA’s Battlefield Heroes (circa 2009). That was only 3 years after Bethesda was first selling horse armor.

There’s an intersection of politics and science and this isn’t anywhere close to it. Meme about research funding or the astroturfed anti-intellectualism fucking our progress on vaccinations.

This is just a milquetoast leftist tagline with some science words stapled to it.

There are about 3-5 pedestrian deaths directly caused by bikes per year in the USA. Licensing and registering bikes over that is performative pearl clutching. Add more bike lanes if you’re really worried.

If you’re worried about cyclist safety then properly classify ebikes and lower their top speeds. If a rider wants to go faster than they can handle that’s on them. Might as well be licensing all these Olympic sports, don’t want people sledding or skiing too fast.

An average ebike only weighs ~25 lbs more than an average bike. That’s basically difference between an average woman and a man or within a standard deviation of the average man’s body weight. Should we only be requiring licenses for fat people?

Just set the max speed on the ebike to a safe limit and call it a day. Your speed matters way more than the bike weight anyway (KE=0.5*mv²)

It took me far too long to realize this tweet was about an actual suit and not some tanooki style gay powerup

The middle 4 bullets are standard practice for our current epstein overlords and the top bullet is the Christo-fascist wet dream. At least we get dogs?

…Well, as long as you hide them from Kristi Noem…

Stop. Stop it. No. Bad scientist.